Jessamyn recommended I speak with another librarian about an article I was writing for the American Library Association magazine, and he's at a library that had already reached out to my publishing company about direct-licensing our books.

We talked about the ridiculous markups some of the existing licensing services are charging and he said "what we NEED is someone who's only going to take an eBay or PayPal-ish percentage" and... whoops. This happened.

I already had some existing infrastructure from another publishing-software-related venture, so it was a question of reconfiguring a few things, talking to other publishers we know and...here we are! We've already got several publishers on board but we can't officially launch til our state's business licensing division catches up.

Why do this? There's about 86,000 publishers in the US and 9000 public libraries. I know from the publisher side of things that minimum title count requirements by the larger services like OverDrive are keeping a LOT of these publishers out of the licensing market. We want to fix that.

Thanks, I'm going to point this out to one of our acquisition people.posted by evilDoug at 5:33 AM on March 6, 2015

Come on, can I get a "mefi's own" on this? (Although I'm no librarian.) Super excited about this and looking forward to watching it eat this mess we call ebooks.posted by ulotrichous at 10:21 AM on March 6, 2015